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What’s up with XML 2.0?

No sooner does one standard make it through whatever official processes its parent organization requires for approval, than another version, add-on or successor seems to rear its head. I tend to look at this as a sort of adult version of "the bear went over the mountain" intended as much to keep standards and technology-makers out of idle mischief as much as it represents the inexorable march of progress and technology toward ever newer, better and often more complex implementations of the same old thing.

All this tongue in cheek musing on the banes and benefits of progress comes as a result of turning toward the successor specification to XML 1.0 and 1.1—namely XML 2.0. The original impetus of XML that pervades both 1.0 and 1.1 versions was to make order out of chaos, impose standard syntax and structure (thus these markup languages are deliberately very readable, both for humans and machines) and facilitate mechanisms to foster data interchange and exchange among all kinds of producers and consumers of information, services and content.